VAULTD STORAGE website redesign

Vaultd Storage is an Ann Arbor, MI based start-up company focused on delivering better storage solutions and services to university students. During my final year at the University of Michigan, founder and CEO Brett Mecham commissioned my team to do a full redesign for the website of his then 2-year old company. As an out-of-state student attending the University of Michigan, I was also a customer of Vaultd Storage and had a good understanding of the existing customer journey.

My Role was to serve as a UX Researcher/Designer. We performed extensive competitor analysis and stakeholder interviews to build personas that reflected the needs of Vaultd’s targeted customer demographic. We then used these insights to inform our design decisions and create our wireframes which then underwent usability testing. The final result were a set of interactive prototypes that expanded on the capabilities and features of the existing website.

PRoblem

At the time that my team was commissioned to do the redesign, Vaultd had been operating for 2 years. Consumers are naturally risk adverse towards trusting new services especially in an industry such a storage where customers are giving temporary access to their personal belonging to a third party. Vaultd Storage’s biggest challenge was being able to gain consumer trust and praise among an already crowded market with more established competitors. We conducted an extensive literature review on the consumer spending habits of college students and uncovered the following findings:

Prior to redesign work, Vaultd Storage utilized a simple website that consisted of an “About Us” landing & homepage with a contact form below:

Competitive analysis

The greater Ann Arbor, MI hosts nearly 45,000 students annually. Vaultd Storage was a young company operating in a field with several established competitors, some of which had been operating for decades. We conducted a competitive analysis on other student storage companies in Ann Arbor and in other college cities to understand how well Vaultd’s service and website compared to the market.

interviews and persona building

We identified the core demographic of Vaultd Storage’s customer base and grouped them into three buckets: 1) Out-of-State students that have used competitor storage services, 2) International students, 3) Out-of-state students that have never used any storage services. We conducted over two dozen interviews with individuals that matched these criteria and generated three distinct personas.

style guide

Building off of our earlier findings of consumer trust being an important facet to establishing a large customer and user base we wanted to help refine and create a strong and recognizable brand identity for the Vaultd Storage website.

Prototyping and iteration

For our proposed redesign, we wanted to expand the capabilities and content of the website from being a simple description of the company and an accompanying contact form to building features that would center the experience around the customer. One of the biggest insights that we gained from persona building was that users wanted more visibility and transparency over their pricing prior to making a payment commitment and more control over their storage options. Our proposal was to add a user portal to the site that would give the users the ability to estimate pricing prior to making a purchase and create virtual representation of their storage boxes to keep track of their belongings after payment.

Usability testing

Once we delivered our mockups, we sampled over a dozen subjects to do detailed and task oriented usability and heuristic studies while observing variables including time to complete task, subject body language, and on-screen interactions.

Final screens delivered to client

Landing Page